Sports outlook

Hello, coach John Skeans. Welcome to Nevada.

I fully intended to be at Nevada High School the morning you went there to meet the players, students and media, but conditions, over which I had no control, prevented it. I'm still anxious to meet you and I know I will someday, I hope, not too far in the future.

I'd have to say there aren't too many people still breathing in this town who have known many more Nevada High School head football coaches than I have.

While my dad always said I knew Orville Gregory, I can't remember him. After him, I've known them all, and before him, I knew three others.

When you've been around and connected with sports as long as I have, you see coaches come and go surrounded by all manner of circumstances. Heck, we even had one coach quit here because five people (who had no authority) didn't like him.

As it always is, some coaches have left under a cloud of controversy or nearly been run out of town on a rail while others have been lauded and praised far past the day of their departure. Those in the latter category have always been the successful ones in terms of wins.

In the days before I went to work at the Nevada Daily Mail, local coaches, starting in 1949, were Gene Rimmer, Danny Clopton, John McKinley, Chuck Shelton and Moe Cotter.

The only one in that group who had difficulty exerting the authority needed to be a strong head coach was Clopton, the quintessential nice guy. Still is, too.

McKinley would have been a popular head coach, but came to Nevada as a counselor with plans to leave his coaching career behind until he was pressed into duty.

Shelton was the first coach I knew to approach or, maybe even, arrive at legendary status. Fans were hungry for a winner, which he delivered with his 10-0 season in 1966.

I still remember coming home from school at the University of Arkansas one weekend to find John Osborne sitting on the couch in the living room of my parents' home. Little could I have known at that point just how close we would get to one another after I went to work here in 1973. It was sure tough on my dad when he left.

Since Osborne there have been: Shane Cavanah, Lynn Erickson, Alan Spencer, Larry Hurst, Doug Cogan, Bruce Humphrey, Doug Martin and Jerry Cornelius.

But, you know, two of the coaches I admired most are not even on any of the above lists.

One of them was Dr. Finis Englemen, the impressive man who founded football at Nevada High School and found time to be both football coach and superintendent, and a gentleman who you could listen to and be impressed by every time you met him. The other was E.A. Markey, a ramrod-straight and imposing gentleman who was coach of Nevada's first undefeated (they had a tie with Joplin) team and later became a legend in Kansas City's Interscholastic League. Forty years after coaching here, Markey could recite his entire roster, knew the score of every game and would discuss specific plays that proved crucial in that 8-0-1 season. In two years here, Markey was 14-2-2. Markey and Engleman died within three days of one another in 1978.

There was also a short-time coach here named Paul Howell who didn't impress me as being very knowledgable about football. He was a chemistry teacher, anyway, pressed into duty when head coach Chester Bowles' National Guard unit was called to active duty just prior to World War II. Bowles failed to survive the war.

Now don't think for a minute that I've known them all. There are plenty of NHS coaches I never knew, including: Harold Reade, William O. Neel, L. E. Oliver, J. W. Reid, Chester Bowles, Earl Deimund and Clement Reed.

Then there was the strange saga of Cogan. I went to the field house one day just before practice started and planned to do a story the next day. By that time, he'd quit and was heading to Colorado.

What a deal!